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AMD64 Preview

Posted by timothy on from the progress dept.

Araxen writes "Over at Anandtech.com they have an interesting preview of AMD's 64 bit processor on a Nforce3 mobo. The results are very impressive with the Anthlon64 beating out Intel's P4 best processor soundly in their gaming benchmarks. This was only in 32-bit mode no less! I can't wait for 64-bit benchmarks come out!"

4 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Will it be secure? by samjam · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When are some of these newer processors going to implement the executable permissions bit in the MMU so that the STACK can be NON-EXECUTABLE (ok I know some trampoline stuff needs executable stacks, well they can ask for it where needed by setting the executable bit for a small region)

    And when are some of these new processors going to be fully virtualizable? I'm talking about PUSHF and POPF generating exceptions like directly setting the interrupt flag does.

    Think how easy plex86 would be to run on a processor that did this properly?

    Code-morphing Transmeta (come one!), AMD (maybe?) Intel (no chance?)

    Sam

    --
    blog.sam.liddicott.com
  2. Athlon64 will be in short supply by afidel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    or so says Ars Technica. In addition most of the initial shipments will go to motherboard manufacturers for bundling with their boards. I really don't like the idea of that becoming common practice as that much purchasing power will mean tight pricing controlls. Read more Here.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  3. Re:Intel's response by mjuarez · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Of course, you can buy a dual-Opteron or even a quad-Opteron TODAY if you want, or you can wait until late this year to buy a Prescott system, which is not 64-bits nor multi-processing.

    By the way, did you know Prescott, along with its mobile version Dothan, was delayed because it was dissipating almost 103 watts? For the record, Opteron is dissipating about 60 watts.

    Marcos

  4. Re:64bit performance gains... by timeOday · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The benefits from the memory subsystem will be offset by the fact that objects containing pointers will be twice as big as on IA32. That means objects could have twice the cache footprint and twice the memory bandwith requirements.
    I wonder if it will be possible to use 32 bit pointers within the X86-64 isa? This would save memory on pointers but give you access to the extra registers, instructions, and one-whack 64 bit math (which should be great for encryption and compression, without using special mmx instructions).

    I thought I remembered SPARC being able to do this, but it looks like SPARC programs must be compiled with 64 bit pointers to efficiently perform 64 bit arithmetic.